Correcting the equation

A neurosurgeon injects foetal tissue into the cranium of a man suffering from Parkinson's disease: after the man dies, the autopsy finds hair and teeth in his brain. A vulcanologist leads his team to observe a grumbling volcano which blows up in their faces; anthrax escapes from a Soviet bioweapons facility; gene therapists ignore protocol and kill a volunteer subject; a Texas forensic lab serially fingers the wrong people; a programmer's oversight leads to the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter.

The book might more accurately have been called When Scientists Go Wrong, since much of the pleasure in each of LeVay's expertly narrated chapters (the author is himself a neuroscientist) is in watching science go right, as subsequent empirical investigations throw light on what went wrong in the first place. LeVay interviews as many of the surviving protagonists as possible: some are regretful, others defiant, and many curiously misremember key facts (he has a beautifully understated way of pointing this out). The soberly argued upshot is that disasters will inevitably happen: "There may be an irreducible core of risk in science that cannot be eliminated without eliminating science's rewards." Throughout, he displays a decided verve for both storytelling and hardcore explication. I was particularly pleased to learn that a reactor meltdown is referred to in the biz by the euphemism "nuclear excursion".